Tag: education

A homeschooled human being who expresses the power of learning through unschooling! The topic ‘homeschooling’ is still tabu in most modern and civilized societies where it is thought that learning occurs at school. Before we express our inclinations versus or against homeschooling, we need to ask the questions ‘what is learning?’ and ‘how does it happen?’ One of the reasons why my husband and I decided to homeschool our kids is because we believe that kids need to FEEL FREE. Schools do not offer freedom. Hence, we need to ask ourselves whether what they call ‘learning’ connotes learning or whether it puts kids into a box according to which their minds get shaped and their creativity annulled. This video puts it into simple words and I thought I would share it as it gives the whole picture of what homeschooling actualy is: learning to learn and a constant search for the truth, or in other words learning from the soul, expanding meaning and connecting to your inner knowledge and spirit.Kids who are homeschooled become creators of meaning. They change the world. Their learning space is not the classroo. It is the whole world with its energy, trees,greens, mountains, animals, seas, oceans, lakes, rivers, flowers, colours,…

These are some interesting facts which I think are worth sharing with as many people as possible. This is the main reason I decided to publish this youtube clip here as well. The fact that aspartame and sucralose is contained in all soft drinks and most mass-produced processed food is not new to me. What really pushed me to publish it here is the shock I lived when I visited Egypt, a “Mulsim Country” where most “Muslim families” avoid alcohol and other haram things which harm their bodies (I totally agree) and at the same time are unaware of the danger they put their kids in when feeding them any kind of food from the super market. After every meal 7up is offered to everyone and there is not one day during which I have not seen a kid drinking a soft drink. Globalization has highly damaged these “third world countries” by sucking them inside a vicious cycle called “free trade”. What we once considered “developed” countries, such as Egypt ( a country where civilization started and a country rich in all possible resources), is now considered a “third world” country because 1. it lacks its natural resources, which are taken away from them by big multinationals in order to produce medicine and other products needed in order to boost “our progress” and 2. because there is a lack of education which leads to severe economical, social and political consequences which I will talk about in my next post.

This post has its focus on the consequences of putting in our body aspartame and sucralose.

To fully be we need to be active creators of the universe.
Dialogue and communication are they keys for a functional interaction between human beings, who through sharing, create a beautiful picture. A shapeless picture full of infinite colours.
Dialogue and communication are both interlinked. There is no dialogue without communication and there is no communication without dialogue.
What is significant for a dialogue to exist is the capacity of the human beings to listen while interacting.
Being formless and thoughtless while listening is a skill which requires concentration and the abandonment of anything pervading your ‘self’. Any concept, any knowledge you have acquired, any previous experience, any previous thought or feeling from the past need to be annulled. It is the process of tabula rasa you need to enact, which will enable you to fully understand the new message your interlocutor is giving you. Like Bruce Lee says: ” Be like water. Shapeless. Formless. You put water into the cup, it becomes the cup. You put it into a glass, it becomes the glass.” If you really want to experience the plurality of life and embrace this immense diversity, then let go of all your treasure and let the new flow of energy (the message of your interlocutor) caressing you, touching you but not entering you. You automatically become that energy and you will live that moment. You will understand a different ankle of that particular moment, which you could only see with your eyes. Now you can see it with the eyes of the other person and you will understand it with those eyes. This is the moment when you realize that everything is shapeless. You are the one giving it a shape through your view, through your eyes. What you see depends on you. Everything is abstract.
This is one way of listening. I call it active listening which I deem to be a powerful and creative way of living and interacting. It is necessary for dialogue and communication.

Then there is a passive way of listening which happens naturally when the interlocutor becomes a narrator rather than a facilitator. We are all active and passive listeners at the same time. Our activeness and passiveness depend on the way our interlocutor relates to us, or the way he does not relate to us at all.
Our interlocutor relates to us when he is communicating rather than talking.
Talking and communicating are two different ways of using words. Talking is not an art. Communicating is an art and a skill. Talking happens unconsciously and spontaneously. It is like breathing which also happens automatically. Communicating happens only with awareness and high consciousness of the self. It happens when you stimulate and engage the other person and when while engaging him you remain shapeless, without any thought and flexible for any change that might happen during that moment of interaction. That is communication: an active interaction between two human beings who are sharing the same moment and are bringing in that moment their own colours of life. Through the motion of that moment the colours get amalgamated. They form a rainbow of colours where both human beings can be authentic and at the same time embrace the difference of the atmosphere they are immersed.

I’d like to link my philosophy discoursed above with my “profession”. The term profession is too limited for me. That is why I quoted it. It is so narrow to say “I am a teacher” or “I am a programme developer” since there is so much more to attribute to the statement “I am..”.
In this society I am an educator.
What I am actually doing is not educating, but facilitating education.
Educating is passive while facilitating is active.
Who do I need to educate? Everyone is already educated. They know more than I do.
So, what do I know?
For me the process of educating consists of facilitating the hidden knowledge which is in all of us.
In that way I am not teaching any knowledge. I am facilitating the process of teaching oneself.

The people I share the classroom with, known as my students, are actually my teachers.
Together we create our learning environment.
My task, therefore, is not to transmit anything – no knowledge, no concepts, no information.
My task is to establish the blueprint of what can happen within time and space.
And believe me: anything can happen between time and space!
My students react to my creation by bringing in their knowledge, namely their own ‘self’.
Together we create the learning environment known as class or lesson.
Only in this way the participants will be connected to the totality of that reality.
To be truly human the individuals need to be active participants. Only active participants can create and transform.

As Paulo Freire says “education is suffering from narration sickness”.
What he says mirrors reality. How many times have I seen teachers sitting in the classroom and just talking, talking, talking. Talking without communicating to their interlocutors.
In a non learning environment “the teacher talks about reality as if it was motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable. Or else he expounds on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students. His task is to “fill” the students with the contents of his narration – contents which are detached from reality, disconnected from the totality that engendered them and could give them significance. Words are emptied of their concreteness and become a hollow, alienated, and alienating verbosity.The outstanding characteristic of this narrative education, then is the sonority of words, not their transforming power. “4×4=16: the capital of Para’ is Bele’m.” The student records, memorizes, and repeats these phrases without perceiving what 4×4 really means, or realizing the true significance of “capital” in the affirmation “the capital of Para’ is Bele’m,” that is, what Bele’m means for Para’ and what Para’ means for Brazil. Words here turn students into “containers”, into “receptacles” to be “filled” by the teacher. In the non learning environment created by the teacher or depositor there is a lack of creativity, transformation and knowledge. Here individuals cannot be human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other. In the banking concept of education, knowledge is a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing. Projecting an absolute ignorance onto others, a characteristic of the ideology of oppression, negates education and knowledge as processes of inquiry. Education is the reconciliation of student and teacher. Both are students and teachers at the same time. Banking education is the result of an oppressed society. The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students’ creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation ” (Freire 1993, p.52-55).

I thought of quoting Paulo Freire here. He is one of the most inspiring people I have come across. I often quote him. He seems to be fitting everywhere. He is an educator who does not educate. Transparency is what makes him who he is.

I experienced passivity during a university “contact course” where “there was no contact” and therefore “no course”. lol
So, in the end I did not understand why they called it contact course.
This course had been organised for extramural students, namely those who like me, study at home and do not go to lectures. It was the first time I experienced a “contact course”. There I met my lectures who have done admirable work in terms of material preparation and selection. I enjoyed all the material they had selected. However, they lacked the capacity of creating a learning environment.
They put up power-point slides which summarized the material that I had already read at home.
Since for me learning consists of a constant interaction of diverse human beings who manifest their feelings and impressions about moments, situations and things in general, I could not understand what the purpose of that “contact course” was.
I could have stayed at home reading the material rather than flying all the way to that “contact course”.
At the end of the course our lecturers grouped us up and gave each group a piece of paper with a situation and problem we had to solve. Each group was given a theory in line with which we had to solve the problem.
In the end each group had to come up with their solution and present it to the class.
There are two possible reasons for this:
Either they wanted us to understand the key arguments of each theory, which according to me can be understood well by reading the material, or they wanted to put us in a box with tiny corners out of which it was not possible for us to think further. Each box had a name. There was the ‘modernisation theory box’, the ‘neoliberalism theory box’, the ‘dependency theory box’, etc. All “past boxes”. There was no space for something new.
It would have been enough to read the material in order to be able to accomplish that task. Nothing else. I did not need to go to the ‘contact course’ and ‘interact’ with the people, since there is no interaction required if you are put in that narrow box. This is it. Everything you need is in that box. If you think out of that box, then you would break it and you would not act or think according to the ‘neoliberalism theory box’ which you were meant to be faithful to.
Furthermore, all those theories originated in the past. We can talk about them without immersing ourselves in them. We can talk about them and discuss them by being fully detached.
What about a new theory or new theories based on current events or reality which each group could have come up with by a natural interaction?
None of that was even thinkable.
This is not a critique. It is just an experience I would like to share with you dear readers.
I enjoyed my contact course and the diversity of it. It was something different for me and it surprised me, since I expected a contact course and not a lecture.
I love surprises and I love experiencing anything that comes into my life.
Development studies is what I am studying. It is the school of people.
Where are the people?

I have noticed recently that when I write I quote a lot of words. Why? Simply because behind every word there are multiple meanings.
People ask me what I do for living? I say: I “teach” English.
I quote the word teach because it does not actually mean teaching, as people would frame it. It is not about me teaching “my students” English. English is just the mean I use to fulfil a much greater job, namely CONNECTING. In my class I create energy, synergy, synchronisities, vibrations.
My students are their own teacher. I am just the facilitator. I show them how to learn. I do not transfer knowledge.

In my class there is no”mistake” or “correct answer”. There are so many correct answers to one question.
Every student sees the question with different eyes and consequently has a different answer.
I accept any answer and any “spelling mistake”.
I focus on communication and expressing from the heart without limitation.

Today I gave my class a “grammar test”. One of my students had not finished while everyone had finished and it was time to give them a break as well. So, I collected all the “tests” except the one of the student who was still writing, and left the class. I told her to finish her test and give it to me after the break.
I cannot forget my students’ face. They could not understand why I would leave my student alone in the classroom surrounded by books from where she could have “copied”.
She can “copy” if she wants to, but she won’t do that because it is not “a test” whose score will classify her level of English. It is a simple exercise through which she can see what she has understood so far and what she still needs to practise. I never give them tests. I only give exercises. Therefore, there is no anxiety. All there is is a high level of confidence and spontaneity.
This is just a small example of what happens in my class.

In my class, there is no way to study. People are on the floor or in the corridor. Some people listen to music while studying, others stand up and walk while doing their exercises. I love this learning environment, where everyone is free, where everyone collaborates with each other.
In the end, they all get the answers.
I never give them the answer. Aren’t they awesome?
Active learning is what learning is all about.
I find it difficult to give my students scores. How can I give them scores?
For me they are all top, beautiful human beings who are sharing the learning experience.

For education to be educative there needs to be a focus on creativity and freedom.
Any concept needs to disappear or be reinvented by the students who collaborate and debate.
This means that what is “taught” is not actually taught but just discussed. And there is no conclusion.
All there is, is mere interaction between the students. It is a flow of energy.
It is an exchange of synergies.
I love it when they get into the topic and bring their reality and world view into the discussion.
It makes it so rich. This interaction transmogrifies into an exchange. It is this exchange that I call education.
It does not come from the books. It comes from the people. It comes from the heart.
Education is sharing. Not imposing. Not studying. Not understanding. Not memorising.
If you memorise stuff then you will adopt the box as it is without questioning it, without seeing it, without feeling it. You will not even understand that concept. What happens, though, is that that concept shapes your existence and it limits your creativity. Once you memorize something you get stuck with that and it is difficult for you to see other ways. That concept will be anchored in your mind. That’s when you say “I believe,…”.
For the mind to be free, multiple and open to the plurality of life one needs to reject the concept of “I believe…” since there is no belief. All there is is a constant change with the flow of energy.
Be like water.
I will never stop referring to Bruce Lee, who says “Where there is a way therein lies limitation.”
That’s why there cannot be any education in this world since education is just another box which classifies and teaches different concepts. It fragments the oneness of the universe.
Everything is so connected and is bliss. Education is the tool used by the system which separates this mystical bliss created by mother nature – ONENESS – in order to make things complicated and construct multiple realities in people’s mind, eradicating the essence of the truth – the only truth – oneness.

I “educate” or better “diseducate” when “teaching”….I am quoting a lot these days simply because, as I mentioned previously, there is sooo much behind every word I say that it cannot simply remain unquoted….or the interlocutor will immediately put that word in the box and “organize” it by giving it a meaning which will fit in with society. That’s when it gets out of context.
It seems to be very difficult for people to see the context.
I experience the “out of contextness” every moment I interact with a person in the outer world.
I am always talking about the truth which, however, gets “organized” and labelled under a certain category or box, for example the “relationship” box, the “teaching” box, the “partnership” box, the “love” box.
I am surrounded by boxes. Every box has specific rules.
Where do these rules come from? Who made them up and why do you take them as the norm?
Can’t you see the inapplicability of those rules for every box?
Life is so pluralistic and various that you cannot put a label on a feeling. You cannot label a feeling.
The feeling is yours. It is inside of you and only you know it.

There is a story by Osho which tells us how humanity has been indoctrinated by the system.

The story is called:

The Animal School

The animals got together in the forest one day and decided to start a school. There was a rabbit, a bird, a squirrel, a fish, and an eel, and they formed a board of directors.

The rabbit insisted that running be in the curriculum. The bird insisted that flying be in the curriculum. The fish insisted that swimming had to be in the curriculum, and the squirrel said that perpendicular tree climbing was absolutely necessary to the curriculum. They put all these things together and wrote a curriculum guide. Then they insisted that all of the animals take all of the subjects.

Although the rabbit was getting an A in running, perpendicular tree climbing was a real problem for him. He kept falling over backward. Pretty soon he got to be sort of brain-damaged and could not run anymore. He found that instead of making an A in running he was making a C, and of course he always made an F in perpendicular climbing.

The bird was really beautiful at flying, but when it comes to burrowing in the ground, he could not do well. He kept breaking his beak and wings. pretty soon he was making a C in flying as well as an F in burrowing, and he had a hell of a time with perpendicular climbing.

Finally, the animal who ended up being valedictorian of the class was a mentally retarded eel who did everything halfway. But the educators were really happy because everybody was taking all the subjects, and it was called a “broad-based education”.

(Osho 2001, 151)

A “broad-based education” is what I call homogenizing humanity and eradicating nature form its beautiful diversity.
I’d like to link to this beautiful story some beautiful words my yoga teacher says at the end of our practice when we meditate: “Breathe in. Concentrate on you breath. Every breath is different. Everyone is unique.” How beautifully said. I love those words in line with so many other words.
Everyone is unique and to be intelligent is to by yourself without any interference from the outside.
This requires concentration and focus.
Focus on your breath, as my yoga teacher says, not only during our yoga practice. The focus is to be permanent and constant without any deviation.
As Osho says intelligence dies in imitating others. The moment you imitate somebody else or start comparing yourself with someone else, you are losing your natural potential. You are stupid. People borrowed other people’s eyes. They are living a borrowed life, hence their life is paralysed (2001, 151).

We need to start from education which is nothing but a process of the total indoctrination of human kind. It is the process of colonization of the human mind and soul. It focuses on homogenization and therefore killing diversity. To be truly yourself you need to GET OUT of the system.

While I was “preparing” myself for my exam in development and underdevelopment, I came across an exam question that said: “Why are theories so important?”
I could not believe my eyes! I was shocked. The system shocked me again. Theories are nothing but well thought and defined “boxes” created by human beings in the past and which are no longer valid. Furthermore, theories are well – masticated thoughts, namely thoughts that have been analysed, reviewed, rethought and swallowed as I would express it. In academical terms let’s leave out the term “chew” and let’s use “written”. Theories are also the result of analysis of people who are simply not ME.
“If the above mentioned question comes up in my exam, I’m gonna fail” – that was my first reaction.
Why?
Because I do not think that theories are important. Then another question might come up:”So, why are you studying a paper that is about theories?”
I love reading. Period. I love reading anything, especially what is completely different from my perspective. That’s why I love conversing with priests and lecturers all of who are totally different from me. So, I love reading and knowing what “the box” says. What I mean by box is the system – any system with structures and which functions according to certain rules and criteria. I am a “free spirit”, a wild spirit – a human being.
It is interesting to read about theories and with “reading” I mean being detached from what we read. Detachment means not absorbing any information.
How can we graduate from a development diploma having only read or “studied” theories and nothing else?
How can we SEE our reality if we are looking at it with borrowed eyes, namely those of the past or the eyes of those who wrote a theory about modernization, a past period of time?
How can we apply a past theory to our reality?
Furthermore, while we are thinking about that theory we are missing out of lots of moments which determine our current reality.
So, what have we learnt? How can we solve global warming through the dependency theory for instance?
When the earth started to be affected by materialism – what man created such as cars, plastic, white ware and so many other things without which people cannot live nowadays anymore, dependency theory had not even realized that the earth was suffering, because dependency theorists were occupied with analysing countires’ underdevelopment which was apparently caused by a structured global world-system which made the periphery dependent on the centre. (While being stuck on thinking, analysing and comparing, dependency theorists missed out on the reality – which is the whole point.) In the meantime production kept rising and booming until creating a global headache to the earth. Now volcanoes are erupting, the ocean is angry and therefore reacting with powerful waves known as tsunamis, the whole in the ozone is widening and killing our beautiful plants, flowers and animals including us. We are not part of a higher category only because we possess intellect or “la raison” as French people would call it. We are all living creatures and part of this world. We are plants too. We are animals too. We are living creatures.

Drop the scenario and be wild.
To be wild is what defines our nature.
We are wild creatures. And we feel embarrassed when we have body odour, when we are not shaved, when we walk bare feet on the street, when we eat with our hand in a “public environment” because the system “taught” us to cover our smell with deodorant, possibly NIVEA – which is created and sold by the system by using modified natural products from the so called “Third World” countries. The system “taught” us to shave our beard, armpits, legs in order to be “more attractive”, to use cutlery to eat in order to be considered “sophisticated” and human by society. I could keep on listing a lot more “rules or conduct requirements” which indoctrinate humanity in the name of morals.
The focus on “Human rights” is another way to distort the human mind from reality and from focusing on being themselves in order to indoctrinate and homogenize people.
SEE the scenario:
How is it possible that we got to the point where we adopt and support policies which claim to be protecting “human rights” while clearly defining in the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” what the requirements are “to be human”?
Who made up all these rules about being human?
Where is the reference? We are told by the system such as the university system to “reference” and therefore proof the validity of our statements.
I’d like to ask the system one fundamental question: Where is the reference that proofs the meaning of being human?

The Declaration of Being Human

A structured mind is not a human mind.
A categorized mind is not a human mind.
A knowledgeable mind is not a human mind.
A defined mind is not a human mind.
A full mind is not a human mind.

A wild mind is a human mind.
An instinctive mind is a human mind.

Humanity is wild. Unpredictable and anarchic.
Realizing this fact is purifying the soul and healing cancer.

Be wild!
Be natural – namely the way nature created you
Be human!
(my reference: the human DNA)